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Coming of Age Sunday celebrates the signature year-long journey of our ninth grade youth, transitioning from the inherited faith of childhood to the adult journey of faith, and marked by youth sharing their statement of faith or credo.
That ecofascist thought would surge in our particular historical moment is, sadly, predictable. We live in a time when having two jobs is no guarantee of affording a home and many of our governments consider bulldozing homeless encampments to be a viable policy solution. Meanwhile, every day brings us closer to a future of climate breakdown that, if it is not slowed and reversed, will surely lead to the culling of large parts of our and other species, hitting the most vulnerable first and worst. The process is already well underway. Being alive in a knife-edge moment like this, being forced to be complicit in it, while our so-called leaders fail so miserably to act, unavoidably generates all kinds of morbid symptoms. Inevitably, people reach for narratives to make sense of this reality.
Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (pp. 166-167). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
So much of Klein’s book, Doppelganger, is disappointing. She engages in a stream of consciousness musings that don’t lead to any kind of coherent understanding of underlying dynamics at a deeper, more serious level.
Klein writes in the above passage that ecofascist thought is predictable. Really? What would make one think that? We are told that our climate is warming which will have significant influence on our ecologies and there are frequent media reports of out of control wild fires, huge rainfalls, sea level rise, species extinction, etc. but most people in the world go about living their lives while tsk, tsk, tsking at the misfortune that we see people in other places suffering from. We want our leaders and other people to do something about this state of affairs, but if it's not affecting me there is not much I can do about it. It’s for other people to work on a fix.
With the attitude that it’s not my problem, other people have to do something. We assume a role of passive victim waiting for the suffering to reach us and hopefully we can find ways to insulate ourselves and our loved ones before it gets to us.
We can amuse ourselves by making up stories about other people who, by their actions or inaction, conspire to engage in perfidy. It’s the old good guy, bad guy plot line where the problem is addressed not by taking responsibility but by blaming others.
Meanwhile, power hungry demagogues are more than willing to play the role of savior if only we will make them king or queen and put them in charge. Klein seems to not get this and would rather explain the failure to act in solidarity with others by setting up a nemesis or doppelganger as she prefers to call it who is disrupting and disturbing her personal brand, the way she presents herself to the world.
The rise of ecofascism is not predictable and in fact may never come to fruition because as conscious beings we have a sense of responsibility that will contribute to our rising to the occasion and our better angels will guide us safely home. As the wonderful line in the movie Best Exotic Marigold Hotel says, “Things will be all right in the end. We’re just not at the end yet.”
A field of study I have been interested in and can't find a lot of good material on is "environmental sociology". The topic is how groups of people adjust to changes in the environment. It would seem that some of these adjustments could be proactive, constructive, and actually improve the quality of life for groups of people, or they could be destructive, harmful, and diminish the quality of life.
There are several topics that are interesting to observe such as diminishing availability of water in certain areas for certain populations. The other big one, of course, is energy, especially electricity and how electricity is being generated, transmitted, and utilized. The topic we have been discussing is land use and housing as well as infrastructure like stores and other services in coastal areas. There are people who are studying these topics and designing the structures and systems for the future but we don't hear much from them unless a catastrophe occurs. Then we hear about the failures instead of the successes. When catastrophes are prevented people don't seem all that interested in how they were prevented, but if crises and mayhem occur they are newsworthy.
I don't know what Klein means by her term "ecofascism" which she states is predictable. I could guess what she might mean, having read her previous book "The Shock Doctrine," where she describes the capitalistic vultures waiting for catastrophe to cash in by rigging the economic processes that are utilized to respond to the catastrophe and how people let them do it even if its not in their best interests because they have no other choice and are desperate.
Our capitalistic system is designed to profit the shareholders and profit is their primary if not only objective. Will the capitalistic systems in place seek to aggrandize profit over other human needs and values when catastrophe strikes? What other strategies of managing crises and catastrophes might we design that would respect other values and needs than just the desire to profit? Is ecofascism predictable or simply a choice among management strategies as we adjust to the world that climate change is bringing us?
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